Eva Longoria, an actress who rose to fame as a star of ABC’s ‘Desperate Housewives’ before becoming an outspoken opponent of conservatism, recently flabbergasted countless Americans with a pointed jab at those who believe English should be the dominant language in America.

“We’re the only country in the world that promotes monlingualism,” she said in an interview with MSNBC’s Jose Diaz Balart.

Her accusation elicited widespread criticism on Twitter. Some questioned the legitimacy of her argument…

…while others suggested that, even if what she says is true, there is nothing inherently wrong with learning and understanding a common national language. Just because other countries might be divided by language barriers, many commenters asserted, there is no reason to subject the U.S. to the same issues.

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“If you go anywhere else, especially in Europe, they speak two, three, four languages and it’s no big deal,” she said. “And they have to in order to really navigate their countries.”

Plenty of Americans, however, recognize that this nation does not have the same requirements and, while learning a foreign language is promoted in schools, it is not a prerequisite to performing everyday activities.

Longoria concluded that multilingualism is imperative because “we live in a global community” and should “reach out to other cultures and other people and learn from them and really absorb their cultures as well.”